There are some life stories that, as you read them, bear witness not only to a personal journey but to the darkness of an entire era. The story of Syrian orthopedic surgeon Dr. Mohamad el-Khatib and his wife, Ruba, is exactly one of those stories.
To dismiss the half a million people killed by the Assad regime as mere statistics prevents us from seeing both the true scope of that darkness and how our country rose over it like a sun.
It all began in Eastern Ghouta. While the world watched the news of the siege on television screens, the people of Ghouta woke up and went to sleep with death every single day.
Houses, schools, bakeries and hospitals were targeted; starvation was weaponized. El-Khatib served as a surgeon in field hospitals. While he fought to save lives in operating rooms under bombardment, the hospital itself was targeted multiple times.
The chemical attack on the night of Aug. 21, 2013, became one of the darkest pages etched into human memory. Children poisoned in their sleep, mothers gasping for breath, hundreds of lives extinguished in a single night.
